Our McMan in Bananastan

Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal,
our new Bananastan war chief, may be more dangerous and even crazier than his
boss, Gen. David Petraeus of Central Command. McChrystal reportedly
eats one meal a day and sleeps three hours a night. We can’t know for sure
if that’s true, but we can assume McChrystal wants us to think it is because
it comes from the New York Times, who almost certainly got it from the
press kit McChrystal’s public affairs colonel gave them.

Unconfirmed rumor also has it that McChrystal only drinks rain water to avoid
the effects of fluoridation on his precious bodily fluids, and that he takes
acai berry purgatives to maintain his purity of essence. However much of this
is true or merely legend-crafting, it’s all loony enough to make Petraeus’
one-arm pushup contests with teenage privates look dignified in comparison.

From the sound of McChrystal’s recent confirmation hearing testimony,
the insanity is just leaving the station. He told the Senate Armed Services
Committee "I believe [the Afghanistan conflict] is winnable, but I don’t
think it will be easily winnable.” It won’t be easy to win because it will
be impossible to tell when we’ve won. “The measure of effectiveness will not
be enemy killed," McChrystal told the SASC, "it will be the number
of Afghans shielded from violence." How many shielded Afghans will equate
to victory? More importantly, who is going to shield them? Certainly not McChrystal.

As commander of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), McChrystal
was directly responsible for the assassination strikes that have killed so
many innocents in the Bananastans. Paradoxically, those strikes were the reason
McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen.
Mark McKiernan, got the ax. Compounding the irony is the way McKiernan
came to be cast as the fall stooge.

Throughout our post-9/11 missteps, the JSOC has largely operated outside the
established chain of command; the only authority it appeared to answer to was
Dick
Cheney. When the Dark Lord left office in January 2009, the JSOC became
a free agent. By mid-February the mounting outrage over the collateral deaths
from JSOC strikes forced Vice
Adm. William McRaven, who had succeeded McChrystal as head of the JSOC
in the summer of 2008, to put a temporary
halt to them. McKiernan’s spokes-colonel Gregory Julian confessed that
his boss had not ordered the stand-down, and a "senior military official"
said Petraeus allowed as how throttling back on the baby killing for a couple
of weeks was maybe a good idea. Those statements from the four-stars made it
clear that the three-star McRaven was running his own program.

When the stand-down story hit the press in March, Petraeus likely determined
someone would have to ride the rap for the collateral deaths the JSOC had caused,
and he didn’t want it to be McRaven or McChrystal, whom he still had use for.
So Petraeus quietly issued an order that put the JSOC under tactical
control of McKiernan, which made McKiernan responsible for the McCluster
bombs McRaven and McChrystal and their howling
commandos had created. McKiernan’s
transfer to Fort Palooka came through in short order, and McChrystal became
the new McMan in Bananastan. The McHinations didn’t stop there.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he nominated McChrystal because he wanted
"new military leadership" to go along with the "new strategy."
The new
strategy is the one National Security Adviser James Jones and his White
House war wonks wretched together. It is a compendium of platitudes, aphorisms,
and non sequiturs, a fusty heap of "realistic and achievable objectives"
that are delusional and doomed to failure. We will never establish a "stable
constitutional government in Pakistan" or a "capable, accountable,
and effective government in Afghanistan." If by some miracle we manage
to create "self-reliant Afghan security forces," all we’ll have done
is organize another armed mob that doesn’t like us. We’re already "involving
the international community" for reasons that are difficult to fathom.
Gates has forged a hobby career out of alternately begging
NATO for more help in Afghanistan and blaming
NATO for everything that goes wrong there.

The strategy’s stated aim to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda
and its safe havens in Pakistan" is as hallucinatory as it is poorly written.
You can’t "defeat" a safe haven any more than you can climb a tennis
ball; but even if you could, there would be no point in doing it. Modern evildoers
can run their operations from the sanctuary of the pockets that hold their
Blackberries. Averting "the possibility of extremists obtaining fissile
material" is a snipe hunt. Evildoers are about as likely to convert Pakistani
nukes into suitcase
bombs as they are to find a cure for herpes.

Yet Stanley McChrystal has sworn to Congress that he can accomplish all these
things and more if only he can shield enough Afghans from violence. The House
and Senate Armed Services Committees had a golden opportunity to decapitate
McChrystal and the Pentagon over their Bananastan plan and torture of detainees
and the Pat Tillman cover-up and a host of other mortal sins, but they vaginalized
it. Sen.
Carl Levin (D-Mich.) made a show of growling at McChrystal for a few minutes
before he rolled over and begged for a tummy scratch.

Nobody in the legislature had the baby-makers to oppose McChrystal’s nomination,
because he enjoys the aegis of the most powerful man on earth. As military
analyst Andrew
Bacevich puts it, “McKiernan’s removal confirms that it’s now Petraeus’
army," and King David’s hand-picked "unconventional warriors"
like McChrystal and McRaven are "in the saddle." In 2007, Petraeus
purposely misled
Congress into believing he was seeking a way to bring troops home from
Iraq while he was actually using the surge as a stratagem to buy time to sell
the "long war" to the public, and he got away with it. Now he and
his protégés McChrystal and McRaven are poised to get away with
the same shenanigans in the Bananastans.

And where does our commander in chief Barack Obama stand on all of this? He’s
the one who blessed
the resumption of the errant air strikes and who nominated McChrystal to
take over in the Bananastans. Our self-anointed "agent of change"
has changed into what his predecessor was: a fawning servant of America’s warlords.

Author: Jeff Huber

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S.
Navy (retired), was a naval flight officer who commanded an aircraft
squadron and was operations officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt,
the carrier that fought the Kosovo War. Jeff earned a master of arts degree in post-modern imperialism at the U.S. Naval War College. His weekly satires on U.S. foreign policy high jinks are archived at
his blog, Pen
and Sword.
Jeff's critically applauded novel Bathtub
Admirals, a
lampoon of America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
Jeff lives with dogs in a house by the beach on Chesapeake Bay in Virginia,
and in the summer he has a nice tan.
View all posts by Jeff Huber